…a book or set of books giving information on many subjects or on many aspects of one subject and typically arranged alphabetically….
We used to have one encyclopedia for all human knowledge. Naturalis Historia.
Then human knowledge outgrew the bounds of a codex and extended from A-Z. Then the whole thing blew wide open.
Each of us have our own cultural encyclopedia’s. We all see the world through different foundational truths, grounding perspectives, and methodological ideals. Part of this is due to globalization— that fractal expansion of the human experience whose impact we’ll never fully grasp— and part of it pays its dues to the advent of social media algorithms— those partitioning arbiters of all we see online whether fact, fiction, or fable.
When the French polymath Galileo had to argue a point with his materialist contemporary, Decartes, he consulted a similar encyclopedia to his opponent’s own. He operated out of a foundation of knowledge that was much the same.
Yes, Frontier innovation would have been shifting, and No, Agreement on a guiding moral & historical philosophy to interpret this knowledge would have been difficult to establish, but the base set of facts and potential perspectives to take would have been manageable, and common ground could have been found through adjacent reasoning and similar dialogue partners given a little bit of time.
Agree with this idea or not, the problem of today is not just one of the scale of information but of our control mechanisms.
Algorithms are the final arbiters of truth to decide what enters your encyclopedia. Your feed is your world, your perspective, and the knowledge base from which you operate. If you see only see the moral failures of one group online, you can quickly come to believe this group to be chronically incompetent. Whether you recognize the side of the prism you’re viewership supports or not, your ability to see and discern is altered by the angle from which you look.
As our last historical information control systems in the courts begins to decline and trust in institutions like government wane even further, we are left, in the West, with a question always unasked, always unthought of… From which cultural encyclopedia(s) are you making that asssumption?
